Trump Versus Clinton’s “Woman Card”

“As far as I am concerned, it’s over,” Donald Trump said on Tuesday night, after sweeping five Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. "I consider myself the presumptive nominee." Trump is prone to premature self-congratulation. But his impression of his own strength, as a candidate, is now largely correct. By the time that Trump stepped before admirers at Trump Tower, it was clear that he had won by at least thirty percentage points in the so-called Acela primaries (Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island). The result puts him, at most, one or two states short of securing the twelve hundred and thirty-seven delegates he needs to avoid an open Convention. The best chance for his rivals to stop him will be to deprive him of the fifty-seven delegates available in Indiana, on May 3rd, where he is ahead by about six per cent in recent polls.

The chances of Trump winning the nomination without a Convention fight have risen largely because of the ineptitude of his competitors. While Trump was preparing to speak at Trump Tower, Ted Cruz was entering Indiana with a pratfall. Having declared his devotion to “Hoosiers,” Indiana’s classic hoops movie, Cruz staged his rally in the very gym where it was filmed. Then he spoke soaringly of the “basketball ring” before him. ("The amazing thing is, that basketball ring in Indiana, it's the same height as it is New York City and every other place in this country,” he said.) It was the kind of slip-up (and Twitter frenzy) that other politicians cite as evidence that reporters today trivialize politics—and the kind of mistake that reporters cite as evidence that voters like Trump because they loathe ordinary politicians. Cruz bubbled up from a weak field of rivals, and Tuesday confirmed his emerging reputation as an impressively poor foil to Trump; in four of the five races on Tuesday, Cruz failed to reach even second place, losing to John Kasich, who has yet to win beyond his own state of Ohio.

By Wednesday morning, the race was much more of a one-on-one competition between Trump and Hillary Clinton, whose easy victories the night before effectively ended the prospects of a Bernie Sanders nomination. Losing only Rhode Island to Sanders, she picked up four states and another hundred and seventy delegates. (The Associated Press calculates that she has ninety per cent of the delegates she needs to receive the nomination.) Sanders maintains that he will stay in the race at least until the final primaries, in June, though the spoils, at this point, are mostly the influence that he might inject into the Party platform, or the speaking slot he can negotiate at Clinton’s Convention.

But the most enduring moment of the evening was likely not Trump’s battery of his Republican opponents. Asked about Clinton, Trump said, “If Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she'd get five per cent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card. The beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.” Some reports described the line as seemingly impromptu. It was not. Earlier that day, on “Fox & Friends,” Trump road-tested a version of this strategy, saying, of Clinton, that the “only thing she’s got is the woman card. That’s all she’s got.” Having spoken of the Fox host Megyn Kelly’s menstruation, Trump is now talking about Clinton’s “woman card,” and, with nearly six months of head-to-head competition to come, he has ample time to express his views of women to various portions of the electorate. As Slate points out, he has called breast-pumping in the office “disgusting,” and has expressed his skepticism of working mothers’ professional commitment, saying, “She’s not giving me one hundred per cent. She’s giving me eighty-four per cent, and sixteen per cent is going towards taking care of children.”

Among women voters in 2012, Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama by more than ten points; among unmarried women, the gap was thirty-six points. Trump’s gap is larger; in recent polls, he has been viewed unfavorably by sixty per cent of women, and, if he pursues his “woman card” strategy, he could also be setting the stage for a historic year for women candidates in the Senate, where Democrats have nominated women in nine races. In 2012, Republicans blamed the candidate Todd Akin, who used the phrase “legitimate rape” during the Missouri Senate race, for tarring the Party with the image of a waging a “war on women.” Trump’s vulnerabilities, in the Akin vein, are considerable. His slog to the nomination may, in fact, be closer to the end than many in his Party are ready to admit. But a different kind of race is only beginning.